Chancellor: "Failure to pay would virtually guarantee that data would be lost."

Further Reading

The Los Angeles Community College District (LACCD) paid a $28,000 ransom in bitcoins to free up the Los Angeles Valley College campus’ network, e-mail, and voicemail systems, which were targeted during a winter break when the campus was closed.

According to a Wednesday statement from an LACCD spokesman, district officials concluded that it was worth it to pay the ransom—in part, because the district has an insurance policy that covers such incidents.

“It was the assessment of our outside cybersecurity experts that making a payment would offer an extremely high probability of restoring access to the affected systems, while failure to pay would virtually guarantee that data would be lost,” LACCD Chancellor Francisco C. Rodriguez said in the statement. “After payment was made, a ‘key’ was delivered to open access to our computer systems. The process to ‘unlock’ hundreds of thousands of files will be a lengthy one, but so far, the key has worked in every attempt that has been made.”

According to the FBI, ransomware payouts in the United States jumped from $25 million in all of 2015 to over $209 million in just the first quarter of 2016.

Cyrus Farivar
Cyrus is a Senior Tech Policy Reporter at Ars Technica, and is also a radio producer and author. His latest book, Habeas Data, about the legal cases over the last 50 years that have had an outsized impact on surveillance and privacy law in America, is due out in May 2018 from Melville House. He is based in Oakland, California. Emailcyrus.farivar@arstechnica.com//Twitter@cfarivar